Amy Atkin was
the first female Nottingham machine lace designer, however, like many other
women of her time, she relinquished paid work on marriage which always seemed
to me a great waste of talent. Reflecting on her life and work I decided to
carry out some practice-based research focusing on the domestic constraints she
and other contemporary female designers faced at the beginning of the twentieth
century. I studied the archive of her beautiful designs in the Collection of
the Nottingham City Museums and decided to base my response on table mats
incorporating lace in a reference to Judy Chicago’s use of place settings in her
famous feminist work ‘The dinner party’.
The lace panels
are my designs inspired by Amy’s archive and are worked in needle run lace on
machine net; hers would have been produced on levers lace machines. The lace is
merely tacked in place indicating that it could be removed at any time, much
like the careers of these talented women, and each mat is embroidered with
wording from the marriage ceremony ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for
poorer’ highlighting the changes in women’s circumstances on marriage. If you
are interested in reading more about the project I’ve written a paper about it
in Textile the Journal of Cloth and Culture which is available through
the following link
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